PPC - MISTAKES

At Sonic X Media, we ran a lot of SEM campaigns, and doing so we have seen our fair share of PPC mistakes. Today we will go over some of the common mistakes we see when conducting basic audits or taking over an account.
Here are a few of the things we run into that will hurt your digital marketing efforts:

Few or No Optimizations We have found that in most cases, the people who are unhappy with their online marketing performance are also the people with little or no history of changes on their accounts. If there is no history of changes, it means you are not optimizing or adapting your campaigns. When we see this in a client’s account, we immediately know they haven’t had dedicated eyes on their account and have been neglecting their marketing efforts. We call this “set it and forget it.” Yes, Google/Microsoft has good Ai systems but it doesn't mean you can forget about optimizing. Search behaviors are always changing and you get new insights and you have to constantly learn, evolve, and improve your performance.

Incorrect or Outdated Conversion Tracking
We feel like this is the biggest mistake we see when conducting our audits and it’s your most important thing for the platform Ai. If driving conversions is the goal of your SEM campaign, not being able to track them accurately means you won’t have accurate insights into the very purpose of all your work. The most common thing we see is the tracking pixel (code) is no longer tracking conversions or if their conversion tracking is unverified. You never want uncertainty in your data, especially when the Ai is optimizing.

Using Only Broad MatchBoard match is great for prospecting but not if you are not optimizing to drive to the final conversions. Being overly reliant on broad match keywords can doom all your campaign efforts. Board keywords allow Google/Microsoft to bid on searches with synonyms, misspellings, related searches, or variations of the keyword. What ends up happening is that one specific keyword takes up the majority of spend in a campaign or ad group. Which causes the low performance of other keywords and wasting your budget on irrelevant clicks. Remember that broad match keywords have some value but your end goal is conversions. 

No Negative KeywordsMy dear people, negative keywords are good in ad campaigns! It’s important to have more than one type of negative keyword, not just a master list. For example, if you’re running a campaign for a real estate agent and have the word “estate” as a keyword, you’d want to negate searches looking for an estate sale, taxes on the estate, or even estate planning. Otherwise, your budget will be wasted on a bunch of people looking for other estates that have zero interest in the service or product. It's like giving Google/Microsoft free money.  

No Day Parting
Day Parting = Ad Scheduling, allows the ads to increase or decrease bids during certain times of day, days of the week, and what times of the day the ads will show. This allows you to only advertise or more heavily advertise during times that tend to see better results.

Testing 
Yes, you have to test your PPC campaigns! At Sonic X Media, we always use the philosophy “Media + Creative = ROI. For the campaigns to work, you need to test using different media (strategy) + copy (creative) to create your ROI. Whether it’s about keywords, location targeting, ad copy, etc., testing is essential to optimizing an account. You test, learn and adapt to optimize based on what you learned from tests.

No ExtensionsLet’s face it everyone is a rush so why wouldn’t you make it easy for users to convert faster. Depending on your business there are different extensions, but they all are extensions of the ad that provides users with more information. Plus, they give more copy on the search engine result. 

Bad Copy Or Generic
Again we’ll bring up our Sonic X Media tagline Media + Creative = ROI. We saw a lot of bad or generic copies in our lifetime. Few things we notice: 

• Missing no third headline or second description) 
  
• Generic ad copy. Rather than writing unique ads per ad group. 
  
• No Promo Copy
  
• Boring Copy
  
• Copy not matching landing page
  

Don’t be a silly goose, be creative!

At Sonic X Media, we understand the value SEM campaigns bring to any digital buy. When building out campaigns, we do a lot of testing and make sure we are bringing the ROI to our clients. The steps above help guide us but there are other things we look at like in-market audiences, SEO keyword, media spend, etc. We’re always evolving and adapting. Contact us to learn what we can do for you. SonicXMedia.com/contact-us